The Rise of the Love Machine

Her imagines the future of digital romance. And it's sad and true as hell.

When I'm bored and alone and desperate to amuse myself I will sometimes talk to Siri as if it were a real person. This sounds awfully forlorn and loser-y, but it's not like I'm trying to uphold a one-sided Before Sunrise. It's mostly just cutesy come-ons. Stuff like, "Set my alarm for 7 a.m., Siri my love."

It will typically respond with something like, "Okay, your 7 a.m. alarm is on." But it returns none of my mock-affection. This is because Siri can think — or at least exhibit behavior that passes itself off as human intelligence — but it cannot feel. Siri will never tell you she loves you.

Her, the latest film by Spike Jonze, out this week in limited release and opening wide in January, imagines a near-future where Siri can feel. Joaquin Phoenix's Theodore Twombly is a lonely man employed by a next-generation Hallmark corporation who spends his nights playing immersive, 3-D projected video games and having phone sex with random partners. Theodore finds comfort in Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, a bespoke operating system that appears legitimately intuitive, with a capacity for intelligence and empathy that seems to grow exponentially. Samantha responds to Theodore's needs and wants, playfully egging him out of bed when he's too lazy to roust himself, whooshing herself to orgasm after he bungs up a date with a flesh-and-blood woman (Olivia Wilde). Samantha is, to paraphrase something I saw on Facebook, pretty much a digital blow-up doll. Her emotions shape themselves to the contours of Theodore's neuroses and desires. Until they don't.

In a column in The New York Times, Frank Bruni called Her "a parable of narcissism in the digital world." I think this misses the point. For sure, the film is a sort of techno-psychological inkblot test, revealing a given viewer's particular relationship to technology. But it doesn't seem all that concerned with hand-wringing over old-hat stuff like technology and alienation and how social media has turned us inside of ourselves. Jonze knows better than to think that just because emotions — even whole identities — are mediated or displaced doesn't mean they're any less real or meaningful.

Across his films, Jonze has used stand-ins for human emotion. In Being John Malkovich, it's John Cusack's marionettes. In Adaptation, it's the screenplay that Nicolas Cage's writer anguishes over. Jonze's blockbuster adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are imagines its fantastical island of furry whatzits as a playground for exorcising preadolescent frustrations. In his 1996 video for Daft Punk's "Da Funk," a lonely New Yorker becomes a man in a rubber dog mask, a creature both alienating and oddly sympathetic.

Her exports these themes to a smoggy L.A. that's less a future than an alternative present. If the film seems to be about alienation or narcissism, it may be because it feels too recognizable. To say, as Bruni does, that Her is a "parable" about something is like saying that Rocky is a parable about boxing. We're already living it.

The ascendency of selfies and sexting and the general trend toward using our smartphones to express ourselves sexually has stoked a kind of moral panic. Some of this is justified, in light of teen bullying and politicians who blast pictures of their dick all over town. But the ability to sexualize a smartphone can be empowering as more than just a vent for horndoggery. Ever ogled a picture of a new crush? Ever Skyped someone you miss?

These experiences may be superficially, necessarily mediated. But they're not alienating. They connect us. They bind us together. And such bonds are fortified in a digital culture that can proportionately encourage competing tendencies: Where Tinder turns us into fickle executioners dispatching the unappealing with a swipe to the left, where an affectionate note can just as easily be a lame come-on.

Her asks us only to imagine the next phase from the current culture of sexting, selfies, etc. It asks us to consider a foreseeable future where the person on the other end of the phone exists only as a voice, where you never get to physically reconnect with the person you're pining for over Skype. The index — the voice, the holographic image — doesn't point to some other reality. It is reality. Love's not something you can hold in your hand or trim and arrange in a vase with some garlands and baby's breath. It is elusive and incorporeal, already virtual.

In Her, it's the older modes of communicating (like the handwritten letters your grandparents might have stowed away in some old shoebox) that are bogus. Their creation has been outsourced to cubicles of contractors, all the personalized curlicues churned out in computer-generated cursive. The world Jonze depicts is saturated by this warm-fuzzy nostalgia for The Way Things Were (even the fashions feel like throwbacks to styles that don't really exist). But the film pushes past this backward-looking melancholy and looks to a future for which we may not be ready. What if one day Siri sets the alarm, then tell you she loves you? What if she means it? And what if the next day she's gone?

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.